{"id":18539,"date":"2016-04-19T12:51:37","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T19:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=18539"},"modified":"2016-04-19T14:22:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T21:22:17","slug":"news-linkage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=18539","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday News & Linkage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0morning routine: our\u00a0critters get us up at 5 AM, whining for their breakfast. Donna gets up with them to start\u00a0the coffee. Once they’ve eaten and taken their morning\u00a0potty break, they join Donna for some lap time. I want to emphasize that this is not a posed photo. It’s what I see every morning (I did agree not to show Donna’s morning face, on pain of death).<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0321\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ever since I started volunteering at the air museum, I’ve been a Wednesday guy. Now, since so many snowbird volunteers are going home for the summer, Monday\u00a0is undermanned and I’ve been asked to switch days. I know all the Wednesday people, but the Monday folks, so far, are strangers.\u00a0Yesterday, riding in for my new Monday shift, I passed another guy on a Goldwing. At a certain point on the way to the museum, down by the Air Force boneyard, there are only so many places traffic can be going. The guy on the other Wing was still a few car lengths back,\u00a0and by then I’d figured out he must\u00a0be a Monday\u00a0volunteer too. Sure enough, we pulled into the staff parking lot together and had a nice chat about our bikes. Sadly, he’s a snowbird too, and yesterday was his last day before going back north for the summer. I won’t see him again until November. Too bad … there are plenty of Harley guys in this town, but not many Wingers. Maybe I’ll be able to ride with him next winter.<\/p>\n

I’m still tweaking the new bicycle. So far I’ve gone through two handlebar stems, trying to get the bar a little higher. It’s not yet as high as it needs to be: I can ride comfortably for a mile or so, but then I have\u00a0to sit up straight for a while, with just my fingertips on the handgrips. The next step will probably be a different handlebar. I replaced the pedals with a set I found\u00a0online\u00a0($80 at the bike shop, $25 on Amazon) and am really happy with them. Even wearing bike shoes, my feet were slipping off the stock pedals, but they slip no more. I got a good ride in with some friends on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Now I’m trying to figure out how to keep the bicycle from being stolen. After Sunday’s ride we went to a local pub for lunch. I secured\u00a0the bike to the rack on our\u00a0truck with a cable lock threaded through the frame and front wheel, then a\u00a0U-lock clamped to the frame and rack, with an additional cable threaded through the U-lock, rear wheel, and saddle. Not to mention the lock securing\u00a0the bike rack to the trailer hitch, so\u00a0they can’t walk off with the whole kit & caboodle.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0348\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I parked the trunk as close to the pub’s front door as I could, and got up twice during lunch to go check on it. “This is ridiculous,” I kept thinking.\u00a0When I got home I posted this photo to Facebook. My friends scoffed at my feeble attempt to defeat the\u00a0thieves.\u00a0Cables don’t stand up to bolt cutters, they said, and even U-locks aren’t much of a deterrent. They want me to buy an expensive chain made of unobtanium, but I’m on a budget and it’s going to have to wait.<\/p>\n

I probably won’t watch the New York primary tonight. Same old same old, talking heads yammering about numbers. I’m sure the instant CNN calls the winner it’ll be on all channels, no matter what else I might be watching. Maybe the safest thing’ll be to turn off the TV altogether and have a reading night.<\/p>\n

By the way, I find it dispiriting to see so many friends on the left going after Hillary Clinton with the same lies and slanders\u00a0wielded\u00a0by Republicans lo these many years. I hope she does well tonight. #I’mWithHer, as the kids on Twitter say.<\/p>\n

Last week a\u00a0Facebook friend linked to\u00a0a gossip column item\u00a0about an\u00a0anti-Planned Parenthood politician whose 16-year-old\u00a0daughter is pregnant.\u00a0My friend’s intent was to expose a\u00a0right-wing\u00a0hyprocrite, and I get that: perhaps the politician will have the decency to shut up now. But damn, by naming the politician, whoever wrote the gossip column\u2014and all the people who gleefully linked to it on Facebook and Twitter\u2014also named the daughter. Any\u00a0slut-shaming\u00a0troll who wants to make that girl’s\u00a0life miserable\u00a0can now look her up in the phone book or on social media. I’m pretty sure no mom or dad\u00a0who has a daughter would ever post a link like that, and I’m certainly not going to share it\u00a0here. Besides, by now can’t we all safely assume any<\/em> Republican politician is a hyprocrite, and likely some kind of pervert, when it comes to sex?<\/p>\n

And then there’s this: John Kasich Prompts Firestorm after Telling Female Student Not to Go to Parties Where There’s a Lot of Alcohol<\/a>. I do not think John Kasich is a “nice guy.” He’s an anti-woman\u00a0religious zealot, no different from\u00a0Ted Cruz,\u00a0eager to impose\u00a0his brand of\u00a0Sharia law on the rest of us. But look, anyone who pretends college drinking isn’t a huge problem, who refuses to acknowledge the direct link between drinking and campus rapes and assaults, is either working for the liquor industry or willfully ignorant. What Kasich told that student was what any father would tell his daughter. It came across as talking down, and that’s unfortunate. He could have made the same point without seeming to insult women who are concerned about sexual assault. But as much as I dislike the man, I can’t fault him for speaking the truth.<\/p>\n

Here’s an article that should<\/em> be passed around: Trucks Are Getting More Dangerous and Drivers Are Falling Asleep at the Wheel. Thank Congress.<\/a>\u00a0My first post-military job was as a traveling flight safety instructor, driving to USAF bases all over the western USA in an RV converted into a mobile classroom. I was nodding off at the wheel all the time, frightened I’d kill myself and the other instructor who traveled with me. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I started nodding off at the desk job I’d moved on to, that I went in for a sleep study and discovered I had sleep apnea. I look at truckers today and see me a few years back. Accidents involving big trucks don’t get the attention they should from the media, probably because of industry pressure. If you drive on an interstate with heavy truck traffic, as I do when I travel\u00a0between Tucson and Phoenix on I-10, you really need to keep an eye on trucks and buses … they work the hell out of those drivers, who don’t make money if they don’t cheat on the rest rules.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m starting to work on an Air-Minded article about the F-15 Eagle’s fuel system. I’ve got my Dash-1 out\u00a0and have\u00a0uploaded some relevant photos\u00a0to Flickr. What I’m saying is goodbye for now … there’s\u00a0work to do!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0morning routine: our\u00a0critters get us up at 5 AM, whining for their breakfast. Donna gets up with them to start\u00a0the coffee. Once they’ve eaten and taken their morning\u00a0potty break, they join Donna for some lap time. I want to emphasize that this is not a posed photo. It’s what I see every morning (I did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,40,250,10,5,2,8,827],"tags":[619,2085,2090,2089,940,2086,2088,2087],"class_list":["post-18539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bicycling","category-critters","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-motorcycling","category-personal","category-politics","category-social-media","tag-air-museum","tag-bicycle-thieves","tag-campus-rape","tag-drinking","tag-goldwing","tag-new-york-primary","tag-overworked-truckers","tag-slut-shaming"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18539"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18555,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18539\/revisions\/18555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}